Islamism and Modernism

The Changing Discourse in Iran

By Farhang Rajaee

Publication Year: 2007

While many previous books have probed the causes of Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979, few have focused on the power of religion in shaping a national identity over the decades leading up to it. Islamism and Modernism captures the metamorphosis of the Islamic movement in Iran, from encounters with Great Britain and the United States in the 1920s through twenty-first-century struggles between those seeking to reform Islam’s role and those who take a hardline defensive stance. Capturing the views of four generations of Muslim activists, Farhang Rajaee describes how the extremism of the 1960s brought more confidence to concerned Islam-minded Iranians and radicalized the Muslim world while Islamic alternatives to modernity were presented. Subsequent ideologies gave rise to the revolution, which in turn has fed a restructuring of Islam as a faith rather than as an ideology. Presenting thought-provoking discussions of religious thinkers such as Ha’eri, Burujerdi, Bazargan, and Shari‘ati, along with contemporaries such as Kadivar, Soroush, and Shabestari, the author sheds rare light on the voices fueling contemporary Islamic thinking in Iran. A comprehensive study of these interwoven aspects of politics, religion, society, and identity, Islamism and Modernism offers crucial new insight into the aftermath of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution fought one hundred years ago—and its ramifications for the newest generation to face the crossroads of modernity and Islamic discourse in modern Iran today.

Cover

Frontmatter

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments

This book narrates the story of the Islamic movement in Iran, a
framework of thought and action that began as an alternative to
a century of modernization. By the beginning of the twentieth
century, Iranians had succeeded in ushering in a genuine “Iranian modernity,”
in the form of a constitutional polity. Then Iran became hostage
to the “Age of Imperialism” (Hobsbawm 1987) as the Middle East
became the most “penetrated region” (Brown 1984) in the world. ...

Introduction

On February 1, 1979, an Air France Boeing 747 carrying Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini landed at Tehran’s international airport.
After fifteen years of exile in Turkey, Iraq, and France, he was
arriving as the leader of an ongoing revolution. From the airport he went
directly to the cemetery where the martyrs of the revolution were buried,
and declared: “I will appoint a government, I will crush the present
government.” ...

One. The First Generation: The Politics of Revival, 1920s–1960s

The year 1921 was a decisive one for the Iranian polity. In February,
an officer of a Cossack brigade, Reza Khan Mir-Panj, spearheaded
a military coup and changed the face of politics in Iran. In
March, a clergyman, Sheikh Abdolkarim Ha᾽eri Yazdi (d. 1937), moved to
Qom and changed the religious life of Shi῾ism. The first event became instrumental
in turning the traditional state into a socially “baseless” state;
that is, an attempt was made to Westernize Iran by introducing many
modernist ...

Two. The Second Generation: The Politics of Revolution, 1963–1991

In 1971 the shah celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of the monarchi-cal system in Iran. In the same year, Khomeini announced that there was a contradiction between Islam and kingship: “It is reported that the prophet considered the title ‘king of kings’ (malak al-muluk) the most hated phrase” (Khomeini 1361/1982, 2:359). Note that the title “king of kings” was one of the titles of the last Pahlavi king. Moreover, Khomeini claimed that it was the religious duty of the clergy to rise ...

Three. The Third Generation: The Politics of Islamism, 1989–1997

“The Spirit of God joined the celestial domain”: that was
how Iranian radio broke the news of Khomeini’s death on
Sunday, June 3, 1989. Th e announcer eloquently played with
words: Khomeini’s first name, “Ruhollah,” means “the Spirit of God.”
Dealing with Khomeini’s death proved much more challenging than had
been originally assumed. ...

Four. The Fourth Generation: The Politics of Restoration, 1997–2005

In late 1987, an official at the Institute for Political and International
Studies, a think tank, asked me to help organize a conference on the
ongoing Iran-Iraq War. When I agreed, I was invited to a meeting
with a group of Iranian officials who were different from any I had encountered
in various revolutionary institutions or in the public sphere.
They were sophisticated and well versed in the intricacies of the international
system. ...

Conclusion. The Politics of Oscillation

On September 14, 2005, the newly elected president of Iran,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke to the General Assembly of the
United Nations. When he returned to Iran, he reported to his
religious mentor, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli, that when he “began with the
words ‘in the name of God,’” he saw that he became “surrounded by a
light until the end [of the speech].” ...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.